


places we won't walk

by Schistosity



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Blood, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route, HAHAHAHA OOPS IM CRYING, Unhappy Ending, verdant wind said hilda is the one to see dimitri die and i said hold my fucking beer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:46:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26319658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schistosity/pseuds/Schistosity
Summary: “I’ll hold you to that, you know,” she says.“As you should,” he says softly, trailing his fingers through her hair, up and up until they caress her cheek. He tucks the errant strands behind her ear, letting calloused fingertips linger on her jaw for just a moment longer.“I am no liar,” he assures. “Nor do I think I could ever be one when it comes to you.”~The war takes many things from Hilda, but the worst of all is taken from her mere moments after she gets it back.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Hilda Valentine Goneril
Comments: 30
Kudos: 92





	places we won't walk

**Author's Note:**

> Canon Not Sad Enough. Ape Brain Make It Sadder Hrrrg. 
> 
> This is substanceless, but please enjoy anyway. I want to thank Alex @kyoguru on twitter for giving me dimihilda brain worms tho, you’re a real one babe.
> 
> Title from Bruno Major’s [Places We Won't Walk](https://open.spotify.com/track/30QNjcM3Q1GnLFIIJjWQL1?si=vBlxWKIpTkOirHktZE-W2w), which I cried to a lot while writing this!

The sun is high. In a field outside Garreg Mach, the blue sky shines like heaven. 

In a corner of the monastery, in a little garden tucked well away from prying eyes, Hilda and Dimitri sit in comfortable silence. He sits by her side, their shoulders brushing, and pretends to read his book while she (more successfully, perhaps) pretends to thread brightly coloured baubles into a necklace.

“What are those?” he asks. 

“Sea glass,” she answers. “It washes up on the beaches near Derdriu. It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

She plucks a piece of glass from the little pile on her lap and holds it out to him. After a moment he takes it from her fingers—as tenderly and carefully as he can, she knows, because he’s a young man consumed by a fear of breaking things.

(She wonders if that part of… whatever  _ this _ is… that she may be delicate but she is not  _ breakable _ , and she refuses to let him believe otherwise.)

Dimitri lays down on the grass next to her, holding the sea glass up to the light. It’s a charming motion—it’s casual and unmeasured in a way people like them rarely can be. The errant sunbeams above them hit it just right, casting dancing shades of green across his face. Hilda watches the light quiver and slip as he rotates the shard slowly.

She likes to look at him like this; laying out next to her he seems like more of a person, less of an  _ idea _ and more of a  _ boy _ . As someone who has spent much of her life chasing the image of a  _ girl _ and casting off the spectre of  _ expectation _ , she can appreciate the clumsy ways his walls fall. She likes to see the way his eyes crinkle at the corners and his tongue pokes out just a little as he concentrates. She likes the way his hair musses in the grass, poked through by all manner of dry wildflowers, looking so  _ un-princely _ it almost hurts. 

“The colour…” he muses, scrunching up his face a little against the light. “It reminds me of something back home.”

“Oh?” 

“In the winters in the north the days are far shorter—” Hilda nods, because she’s heard of the phenomenon, “—and on clear nights lights will appear in the sky—blues, purples, greens—like this.”

“It sounds beautiful…” Hilda says, though when she thinks of beautiful at this precise moment her mind is filled with flaxen hair and blue eyes. It’s a different kind of beautiful, but she assumes these lights are quite lovely as well. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

She threads another piece of glass onto her necklace. The small silences that stretch between them at times like this are comfortable; Dimitri a person with a lot on his mind, and Hilda is a person with a love of relaxation—neither of them are obsessed with the idea of carrying on conversations past their due, simply content to enjoy each other’s company. But then:

“I’ll take you if you want,” Dimitri says softly. 

“Hm?” Hilda drags her attention back to his face. 

Dimitri laughs. It’s a soft and gentle thing, pushed through a crooked little upturn of his lips. Hilda’s gaze rests on his eyes, clear blue and full of light. They remind her of the skies above the mountains back in Goneril; bright and crisp and  _ cold _ without being  _ cruel _ .

“I’ll take you to see them,” he clarifies, lowering the glass and looking up at her. “Next year, maybe—when things are calmer in the Kingdom—you can visit and... I’ll take you.”

Hilda lays her necklace in her lap and blinks down at Dimitri. “You’d do that for me?”

“Of course,” he says, as if it’s as easy as breathing to promise such things. This time next year they’ll be flung to opposite sides of the continent, both burdened by grand responsibility. What a cruel and demanding fate, she thinks, and yet he’s willing to depart from it for her? Just for a moment?

The image is a tempting one. Hands in hands against the cold, breath in the air, snow below and lights above...

She scoots a little closer. 

“Okay but… Sylvain isn’t invited,” she says.

Dimitri laughs at that. It’s a proper one, full-bodied and bright. Hilda grins. 

“You do not have to worry about that,” he assures. “We shall take the backroads so he cannot find us.”

“ _ Exciting _ ,” Hilda teases. “Like something out of a novel? Do I strike you as adventurous?”

“You strike me as free, is that not the same thing?”

“Maybe,” Hilda leans closer. “But you must also know I am  _ ever so  _ unused to Faerghus winters—I’ll catch a chill all the way up there.”

Dimitri hums.

“Then I shall provide you the finest winter cloaks we have—the skins of Faerghus bears are adept at keeping back the cold.”

Hilda privately notes that she would look quite lovely in a bearskin cloak—like a northern snow-maiden, or something equally romantic. But that hadn’t been her point. 

She reaches over to place a hand on the grass beside him, so she can lean over him and look down into his eyes. She smiles, and he smiles back. 

“Perhaps I don’t want my own cloak,” she muses quietly. They are close enough now that she need not raise her voice to be heard. “Perhaps I would be content sharing yours?”

He looks up at her, his icy blue eyes drinking in every inch of her. She likes that about him—his gaze is an honest one. He is open with his feelings in a way she struggles to be, and when his eyes trail the curves of her body, face and lips as they do now, she can read his feelings in those ocean irises as clear as a book. 

“That can be arranged,” he says softly. 

When he looks at her like this, she feels  _ loved _ more than she feels  _ watched _ . And for someone as watched as she, that is no small gift. 

Her long hair, slipping loose from its ties, spills over her shoulders as she leans over him.

“I’ll hold you to that, you know,” she says.

What dappled sunlight peeks through her cascading locks is no longer enough to catch the ends of his hair alight like spun gold, which is perhaps a pity, but she likes it this way. This way, he’s hers. 

The sun and the sky and the trees above cannot see him—nor can he see anything but her. This way, his eyes are for her and her eyes are for him, nothing more, nothing less. Call her selfish, maybe, but she doesn’t mind. 

“As you should,” he says softly, trailing his fingers through her hair, up and up until they caress her cheek. He tucks the errant strands behind her ear, letting calloused fingertips linger on her jaw for just a moment longer. 

“I am no liar,” he assures. “Nor do I think I could ever be one when it comes to you.”

She catches his hand in hers, twining their fingers together ever so slightly.

“Then it’s a date,” she says.

* * *

The sun sets. The sky above Gronder Field bleeds. 

Hilda’s boots slip on the ground, but she doesn’t look down. Looking down would mean admitting the slickness beneath her feet is caused by pooling, still-warm blood, and it is much easier to pretend it’s because of the rain.

She stumbles through the brush, dancing clumsily around bodies and the torn earth they lie in. She can barely keep her bearings, but she  _ knows _ this was his heading—this  _ has _ to be where he was going when he’d slipped from her sight so deftly at battle’s end. 

How cruel a thing, for the world to give her back something dear, even if from a distance, and then let it run from her. 

She’d seen Dimitri across the field and had almost lost it right then and there. She’d been held back, of course, because moments later they’d seen him tearing across the field like a madman. He  _ is _ a madman, others had said, and following his trail of destruction now Hilda cannot help but believe it a little. 

But she still has to see. She still has to find him. 

Fate puts its sick twist on that goal, in the end. 

She rounds a copse of trees just in time to see Dimitri cut down by an imperial soldier—a javelin in his gut, so deep it stays up on its own. He collapses like a ragdoll—like a prey animal, speared in a hunt. He does not get up. 

Hilda sees red. 

When she comes back to herself she’s standing over the body of an imperial cavalryman, his horse tearing off into the distance as Hilda rips Freikugel, dripping with sinew and gore, from the fresh corpse of its master.

She stands there for a moment. Gulping in heaving, desperate breaths from the ashen air, and then she remembers why she’s here. 

Hilda lets the axe fall and  _ runs _ .

(It’s too late. She knows that. 

It doesn’t stop it from tearing her apart.)

She drops to her knees in the mud at Dimitri’s side. 

“H-Hey,” she calls, shaking him as gently as she can. She rolls him onto his back. He coughs.

She almost laughs at that sign of life. It’s a hopeful thing, though she knows on an intellectual level they’re too far from any healers and these wounds are too deadly for such signs of life to mean anything. 

Her hands flutter uselessly over his wounds, so multitudinous and profuse they’ve stained his cloak black as night beneath him. Hilda feels tears prick at her eyes—feels them gather in a tight knot in her throat.

“I fai—failed…”

Dimitri’s voice wavers as he chokes out the words. Hilda feels a pain unlike anything she’s ever felt well up in her heart, and in an instant she’s gathered his hands in hers, squeezing them tight.

“Dimitri…”

“…failed y—you…” he gasps. She can’t tell if he’s speaking to her.

“You didn’t, Dimitri,” she says frantically. “You didn’t fail anyone, okay? Just—”

“Hil—”

He stares up at her, pale and tired and so much older than he had been. The Dimitri that has lived in her head for five years is a perpetually young thing, stained by sunlight, not blood—lying in a field of dry wildflowers and green grass, with the lights of an ocean’s gift dancing on his skin, not a wet, bloody field in the middle of nowhere. 

This Dimitri is different. He has long hair and he’s missing an eye and the lines of his face are gaunt and tortured. He gasps up at the sky—up at her—choking on blood and tears and everything else he’s kept inside that’s been so unceremoniously torn out. Hilda loathes to see it, to see what fate has wrought. 

“Hilda?”

Hilda bites back a cry. She can feel her heart aching in her chest, beating at the walls of her ribcage like a trapped beast. “Yes?” she answers hoarsely. “I— I’m here, don’t worry, I—”

Her speech stutters away as he moves. Slowly, and with apparent difficulty, Dimitri lifts a gauntleted hand towards her face. His familiar hand, bathed now in constricting steel and blood, trails through her cascading hair. Up and up until he stops. Hilda holds her breath and he shakily tucks the loose strands back behind her ear. 

Tears begin to spill down her cheeks, dripping like rain on his face. He doesn’t blink, he just stares up at her with a single eye—half of that clear sky she once spent hours staring into. Only half, but still just as bright. 

His hand lingers, his fingers tracing the curve of her face. His thumb trails across her cheek and she knows there will be a mark, but she cannot find it in herself to care. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

She shakes her head. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

“I do.”

“No you  _ don’t _ ,” she urges, cupping his face with one hand and turning his gaze ever-so-slightly to meet hers.

“I’m not a liar, Dimitri,” she breathes. “I’d never be for you.”

His hand, trembling, slips from her face, and she catches it before it falls to his side. 

“I do not... deserve... to see you again,” he says between shallow breaths. “But I am glad to… is… is that terrible of me?”

Hilda shakes her head with fervour. “No,” she gasps. “No, never.”

She leans down and presses her forehead to his, closing her eyes against tears.

“I’m glad too,” she says. 

And she stays there like that. She stays there, feels him breathe under her—feels him smile, feels him be alive until, in a shattering moment that is not quite discernable, he no longer is. 

In an hour or so she will find her way back to camp, stumbling into a meeting with dead eyes and pale skin, covered in blood not hers. Her friends will be alarmed, but she will wave them off. The blood is not hers. She will tell them, in the most clinical way she can, what has occurred. She’ll tell them that she saw the prince die. She’ll watch his old friends closely, see the spectres of fear and pain and anger cross their faces like ghosts.

She will ignore the looks she gets from those knowledgeable few, the ones who knew the truth behind their days at the academy. It had been easy to hide their genuine affection as Dimitri’s honest chivalry coming up against Hilda’s laziness, but those closest to the both of them knew there was more to their trips away and meetings together than just courtesy. But she will hold her head high. She will smile. 

That will be later, though. For now she stays. She doesn’t know how long she sits there, curled over the cooling body of her lost thing, crying tears for a man who will not hear them. She chokes out heavy sobs against him, rocking back and forth where she sits, as if anything so small will be a comfort. 

And she clings tightly to a hand that cannot, and will not, ever cling back. 

**Author's Note:**

> sorry.
> 
> find me on twitter @claregormy, tumblr @fizzityuck, or writing everyone lives fic just to _feel_ something again.


End file.
